


pulling yourself up by the whip

by misandrywitch



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Chick Please! zine, Origin Story, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 06:23:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4695500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lardo used to worry about fitting into boxes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pulling yourself up by the whip

**Author's Note:**

> super super SUPER huge thanks to bo for organizing the 'CHICKS, PLEASE!' zine that this is a part of!! its incredible please check it out. 
> 
> i've got an obsession with flashbacks & origin stories, can you tell?
> 
> title comes from the poem 'an insider's guide on how to be sick' by andrea gibson
> 
> shittybknights.tumblr.com

When Lardo rolls out of bed one Wednesday morning the messages in her phone are the following: a Facebook invitation to a poetry slam over the weekend, a photo of a pie Bitty sent her at midnight, an email from Coach Murray about team-related business, three desperate messages from someone in her Modernist Art Theory class, two snaps from her second cousins in Hanoi, and one message from Shitty sent at 3 a.m. that just reads, in all caps, “FUCK FOUCAULT.”

So. A typical Wednesday morning, then. 

From the outside looking in it probably seems like chaos, a bewildering jumble of people and problems and perspectives that Lardo is for some reason at the nexus of. She’s gotten used to it.

 

* * *

 

Before Lardo was Lardo she was always Larissa, all three syllables and a bad haircut and never enough to say. A long, clumsy name; teachers used to look right past her on the first day of class because it didn’t seem like it belonged to her. Larissa had dreaded getting out of bed to go to school at thirteen, at sixteen. She’d helped her high school best friend Lily dye her blonde hair black a week before their junior year started, smudging eyeliner around each others’ eyes with their fingers, and Lily had brought their heads together and said “Look, we’re twins.” Larissa hadn’t dyed her hair because hers couldn’t go any darker, and she hadn’t said anything. They’d sit under the bleachers at lunch together when the weather was nice, listen to music on Lily’s portable speakers while Larissa sketched. Then she’d walk through the hallways of her big cold public high school with her headphones on under the hood of her sweatshirt, all black 

 Lardo still feels like that, sometimes. But not all the time. She still wears a lot of black too, much to the chagrin of her mother, but now it’s because she wants to.

 

* * *

 

 

Her friendship with the collective members of the Men’s Hockey team is definitely one of the strangest parts of Lardo’s life at Samwell and it sometimes seems like they occupy all her time and energy. But they hadn’t been her first friends there. Her first real friend throws a sweatshirt across the room at her when Lardo won’t turn off her alarm (the Star Wars theme song), and demands that they go get breakfast. Lardo concedes, hitting the button on her phone, and decides to skip practice because some mornings you just need a little time to yourself.

“These are migrating into my laundry again,” Sabine, Lardo’s freshman roommate whom Lardo hadn’t wanted to get rid of, points at the sweatshirt accusingly. It’s a Samwell Athletics sweatshirt and its several sizes too big. “I think they breed,” Sabine says, snapping a hair tie around her long dark hair.

“There’s a nest under my bed,” Lardo says. She runs her fingers through her hair, tousling it a little, and swipes on eyeliner. “Sweatshirts and dirty socks and jockstraps. Like an athlete fungus. Happens when you get too close to them.”

“I’m calling the exterminator,” Sabine says, and they laugh as they head towards the dining hall together.

She’s a physics major, half a foot taller than Lardo is, and likes Buffy the Vampire Slayer and drinking whiskey straight. They’re both busy enough that they have to schedule in time to hang out, like this morning, especially because Sabine’s never been much of a partier and tends to prefer staying in and drunkenly criticising television. She and Holster get along.

They’re lamenting their crushing junior-year workloads when, naturally, the hockey team troops into the dining hall post-practice. Bitty hollers at her when he sees her, impressively loud considering they’re in a giant room and he’s five-foot-six-and-a-half.

“Lardo!” he yells, waving, which means Lardo is obligated to shout his name back at him.

“I still don’t understand why you let them call you that,” Sabine says. She’s always borne hockey team shenanigans with an air of amused confusion.

Lardo shrugs. “It’s funny,” she says. “I don’t know, it’s affectionate.”

“Uh huh,” Sabine slurps coffee as the team wanders over. They’re all in sweats. Shitty’s are tie-dye.

“How’s the other side of the ass crack of dawn?” Lardo asks, and they all do round of high fives. Ransom and Sabine know each other from intro-level science classes, but then again Ransom knows everyone. Shitty neglects to high-five her and instead picks up the other half of Lardo’s Poptart and bites into it. Lardo snatches it back but it’s too late, and most of it breaks off in Shitty’s mouth. She shrugs and finishes it anyway.

“Miserable,” Bitty says, at the same time Jack goes “Not so bad.” They stare at each other.

“Oh! Lardo,” Ransom says, ignoring them. “We decided this morning that you’re the team dad.”

Sabine snorts very hard into her cup of coffee. Lardo stares at them; Ransom and Holster look enthusiastic, Bitty a little sheepish, Jack completely nonplussed as usual, Chowder confused. Shitty picks at her breakfast some more.

“Uh,” Lardo says. “If any of you think I’m gonna sit you down and tell you about the birds and the bees you better think again.”

“Pshaw,” Holster says. “You think we don’t know that.”

“I don’t know,” Sabine says, and they all look at her. “You can’t believe everything you watch on Sex and the City.”

This elicits a round of appreciative comments, and Sabine looks pleased with herself. Holster even gives her an additional high-five. Lardo feels inordinately proud of this; Sabine was the first friend she’d really made at Samwell and it’s funny to see her interact with the boys in a way that warms Lardo’s heart. Lardo’s life is pretty tightly caught up in the team’s nonsense now but it hadn’t always been that way, and she had made herself embrace it when it had happened. The team jokes that Lardo keeps them all running and puts them all to shame, and she’s self-aware enough to know that this is true. But she hadn’t always been that way.

“He has no game,” Ransom says, “but I have an excess of personal experience on the subject.”

“Doesn’t guarantee you’re any good at it,” Lardo says smoothly, and Shitty snorts. “Which, before you ask, I will not teach you. I will stare at you across the dinner table with a cigar in my mouth and judge your life choices, though.”

“As long as you don’t expect me to talk to you about football it’s a step up,” Bitty says.

“If you talk to me about football you’re grounded,” Lardo says, and everyone laughs.

They all head off to eat and Sabine looks across the table at Lardo. “Congrats on your many giant children,” she says.

“Haus dad,” Lardo shakes her head. “I’m not anybody’s parent.”

“You boss them around,” Sabine points out.

“It’s my job,” Lardo says. “I literally get paid to keep them all organized. And it’s not like that all the time.”

“Do you feel like you’re one of the guys?” She asks, and Lardo considers it.

“I don’t know,” she says finally. “I don’t know if I want to. I’m not. I mean, I’m part of the team but I’m not on the team. I don’t want them to forget I’m not a dude, but I also like that I can keep up with them.” The number of puck-bunny-based jokes had significantly decreased in the Haus since Lardo had become team manager, which she did have to admit was a tag-team effort between her presence and evil eye and Shitty’s installation of the “douchebag jar” in the kitchen (a five-dollar donation was required for casual misogyny, all funds went towards beer). The first few weeks, Lardo had been too intimidated to act like it bothered her, but that had evaporated by her second semester.

“Sounds a little contradictory,” Sabine says.

“Maybe,” Lardo says. “But being their bro and being team manager isn’t all that I am.”

“Amen to that,” Sabine says, and they bump their coffee cups together. “Anyway,” she says, “I think Mary and I are gonna try and go to that showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show this weekend. You down?”

“Uh,” Lardo says, “Is the sky blue?”

 

* * *

 

If you had told seventeen-year-old Larissa Duan that she would become the manager of a smelly, loud, rowdy and generally drunk collection of male athletes who she willingly lets call her “Lardo,” she would have stared at you. If you had told her she actually really enjoys their company and hangs out with them for fun, beats them at frat party drinking games, and understands the rules of hockey, she would have rolled her eyes. And if you’d said that they all listen to, respect, admire and also outright fear her, she would have laughed so hard her stomach hurt.

Life is funny like that.

It’s certainly not what Lardo set out to do when she came to college, and it’s definitely not how she thought things would go the first time she stepped into the Samwell Men’s Hockey abode, which had inspired a wave of fascination mixed with horror. She and Shitty had wound up as partners in one of those tedious presentation-heavy group projects, and when she’d managed to find the Haus (which had taken a while to begin with), Shitty had answered the door in his underwear, holding a beer. It had been 10 in the morning. On a Tuesday.

“Don’t judge them too harshly,” the team’s goalie had said from the living room couch as Lardo left. She’d jumped a little, because she had almost walked right past him. “I know they seem like a lot, but they’re really a complex cast of character who are all vital to the found family narrative you’ve just been written into. I know what you’re thinking,” he held up one hand, “that you already feel a little bit like the token female character in a story about a bunch of dudes, but I promise you’re loads more than that. I know, I read to the end.”

“Um,” Lardo said. “What?”

“Oh sorry,” Johnson said. “Spoilers. My point is they’re idiots, but they’re gonna be your idiots in a year or so.”

Lardo had gone to Africa her sophomore year, and the realization that she missed them had hit her like a ton of bricks. She’d skyped Shitty, and had told him to tell Johnson he was right, though about what she didn’t clarify. 

“He usually is,” Shitty said, and had gone on to tell her about the pie he’d eaten that morning for breakfast, a new phenomenon because of one the frogs who’d just joined the team. Go figure, Lardo had thought. As soon as she left there was suddenly an influx of pie in the Haus.

 

* * *

 

Lardo runs from breakfast to her dorm to Faber, then back to her dorm to grab her canvases, then to Founders to pass off a book to a friend, then to her first class of the morning. She types up three emails in between taking notes in class. She checks four things off her to-do list, and she adds five more

 

* * *

 

 

Larissa Duan to [SMH-list]

Hey everyone, four announcements this morning

  1. Next Monday’s practice time has been moved to 6PM because of Coach Hall’s schedule. Let someone know ASAP if you can’t make it.
  2. If you need a new jersey for this quarter or want a different size let me know by Friday—we’re going to order them then so if you don’t tell me before I put the order in you’ll be out of luck.
  3. There are a whole bunch of items from our last few away games at the lost and found, please check to see if anything belongs to you! It’s all in a bin in Coach Murray’s office. Don’t ask me where stuff is, you can all look yourselves. Birkholtz, your 30 Rock DVD has been in there for three weeks.
  4. Bitty’s making dinner for everyone tonight so come over if you’re free! Seven PM at the Haus, be there or be square.



 

 

Lemme know if you have questions!

Lardo

 

 

Justin Oluransi -> Larissa Duan

Thanks Dad

 

 

Larissa Duan -> Justin Oluransi

lemme me know the next time your dad beats you as badly at beer pong as I did last weekend and I’ll consider that nickname a compliment

 

* * *

 

When Shitty told her about the job she laughed. A shocked laugh.

She’d been eating lunch with Sabine and a few of Sabine’s science major friends when he’d flagged her down, jogging halfway across the dining hall to slide into the empty seat next to her. Lardo had been feeling a bit out of place in the conversation, which kept circling back to their calculus class, despite Sabine’s efforts to include her. It was something Lardo was used to. Everyone looked at her when Shitty shouted her name, plopped down next to her, ran his hands through his hair and cursed.

“This is, uh,” Lardo had paused, because introducing someone as “Shitty” was ridiculous. But he beat her to it.

“Yo, I’m Shitty, nice to meet you, I’ve just had the worst motherfucking morning.”

He had proceeded to tell her detail-by-detail the series of circumstances that culminated in the hockey team being manager-less, a wild and complicated story involving the selling of illegal substances as well as forged pro-hockey-player-signed photographs. He accompanied his story with periodic stabs at the table with his fork. Then he had paused and stared at her. A scary light had crept into his eyes and Lardo had considered running from his very intense eye contact, but had held her ground until he said, “I remember you mentioning that you need a job?”

“Um,” she said. “What?”

“Old manager is now expelled and we need someone—and you said you need dough—and you’d get free beer for the rest of your college experience, that’s a bonus right?”

“I don’t know anything about hockey,” Lardo had protested, still vaguely aware that the rest of the table was half tuned into this ridiculous conversation.

“So? You just gotta help the coaches organize schedules, you’re super mega organized, you’d be great at it and you’d prevent my death. If I get any more stressed out I’m gonna have a heart attack and die.”

Lardo had only known Shitty for a few months, but she has to admit he did an impressive wheedle when he put his mind to it. She didn’t want him to die. And she did need a job. He blinked up at her in despair. His eyes were very green.

“I’m not gonna get it,” she said. “Why would the hockey team want to hire an art major?”

“You’d be great,” Shitty said. “And you’d be good for us.” If it was anyone else Lardo would think he’s flirting, but because it’s Shitty she can’t tell. “They’re not so bad,” he continued. “The team. I mean, they’re bros, but Samwell bros you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“Larissa. You only live once. Free fucking beer. We throw mad wicked parties.”

Lardo chewed her thumbnail, and something possessed her to say, “Okay, fine. Give your coach my email then.”

It was even weirder when she got the job, because it’s one thing to apply for a position you’re completely unqualified for and another one to realize you’re going to have to spend some of your mornings hanging around a freezing and stinky ice rink, that you’re expected to send out mass emails and schedules to twenty-plus athletes you’ve never really met, and that they’re all expected to listen to you. Lardo showed up to her first practice hauling her wet paint carrier and a box full of charcoal for a later class with no idea what to expect. When Coach Hall introduced her she’d felt 20 plus pairs of eyes scrutinizing her like an actual physical weight on her shoulders.

Practice was wrapping up when Jack Zimmermann skated over to her. Lardo had met Jack a few times because Shitty always seemed to be dragging him along to things, mostly against his will. He was famous, or something. Her original impression of him had been tall, good-looking and quiet, but she saw already that he was different on the ice. Clear in his movements, confident, focused, leading drills rather than just following Shitty around.

“Hey,” he said, and the very corner of his mouth had moved up in a smile. “Glad you could make it. What do you think?”

“Do Rans and Holtzy always wrestle each other after practice like that?” she asked, picking up the shortened versions of their nicknames she’d heard Shitty use and dropping them into her speech, pretending it wasn’t weird.

Jack paused, watching them grapple around. Holster had Ransom in a headlock. “Most of the time, yes,” he said, sounding almost sheepish.

“Wow,” Lardo said. Ransom threw Holster off, slamming him into the boards. It looked painful. Holster laughed.

“Please don’t quit,” Jack said, all in a rush. Lardo knew it was probably because the team needed a manager desperately, and Jack Zimmermann was looking out for the team, but it had still been a nice thing to hear. She’d looked up at him. It would have been easier not to say anything, or to make a dismissive comment and drop it, or laugh it off 

“You haven’t scared me off yet,” she said, and he’d smiled properly.

 

* * *

 

Bros are weird, but they’re no weirder than art majors. It’s just a new set of behavior patterns, fueled by Natty Light instead of sangria from a box. Lardo picked up the nicknames pretty fast, the turns of phrase even faster. Lardo gets really good at shotgunning beers and finds she understands hockey a lot better than she thought she would. Lardo is surprised to find she actually enjoys it.

She used to worry a lot about how people perceived her and how that perception lined up with who she really was and how she really felt. At sixteen, she’d been so consciously aware of how she was different, had hidden it, kept quiet more often than not, stayed in the spaces she knew.

Lardo used to worry about fitting into boxes. She still feels that fear, but more and more she’s learning to enjoy sitting on their edges, messing with their lines. It takes time to embrace being idiosyncratic, maybe. It takes time to figure out who you are and not be afraid to show it off.

She’s always been interested in the edges of things, how they connect and bleed into one another, how that changes them. It’s natural, she supposes, because she sits in the middle of a lot of things herself: her ethnicity, her sexuality, her personality, her interests and her friends. She knows it doesn’t make much sense to most people, including herself sometimes. That’s the appeal of modern art over the traditional, the ability and impetus to push things beyond their boundaries, to use space in ways that make people uncomfortable, to break rules.  

She sometimes worries she’s too analytical to really be a great artist, too reserved to showcase her strengths, too frivolous to be taken seriously, that all of these things combine to make a whole that just doesn’t quite balance out. But she’s also too stubborn to want to do anything else, and that has to count for something.

 

* * *

 

 

The first game Lardo attended in her official capacity as team manager was, thankfully, a home game, because she wasn’t really sure how she was going to handle spending any time with the team in a bus. She was helping Coach Murray get things ready in the rink while the team was in the locker room, which was also a relief. If there was really a place where Lardo did not belong the locker room was it.

She was in the middle of texting Sabine, who was coming to the game to be Lardo’s moral support, when Coach Murray’s cell phone rang. He talked into it for a second then waved her over.

“Can you run this stuff back into the locker room? I’ll be back there in a couple minutes but I need to finish setting up here. They might still be changing, just knock on the door.” He held out a clipboard and a stack of paper and Lardo took it automatically.

“Um,” she said. “Sure?” She couldn’t just say no to her boss, so she turned and walked in the direction of the locker room, which felt a bit like a death march.

“How did I get myself into this,” Lardo said out loud to herself, but nobody had a constructive answer to offer.

Lardo took a very deep breath. It would be easy enough to wait another few minutes and tell Coach Hall later that she’d been delayed. It would also be easy to just slip in the door and slip out, unnoticed. She heard voices, some shouting, some laughter, from the other side of the door.

There is no way in hell Lardo was going to be intimidated by a bunch of hockey doofuses. No way in hell. Lardo had been shy her whole life. She wasn’t going to stop being shy all of a sudden, but there wasn’t any reason why she couldn’t also be brave.

Lardo took a deep breath, and banged on the locker room door with her fist and raised her voice. “Yo!” she hollered. “Everyone better have pants on because I’m coming in!”

The door opened and Dave Cohen smiled at her in a way that automatically set Lardo’s teeth on edge. “You really gonna complain?” he asked.

Lardo was very conscious of the fact that she was the only girl in the whole room, that they all towered over her, that they were all part of this team while she was sitting weirdly outside of it. No way in hell. She looked him in the eye 

“If you think I’m gonna be impressed by anything you got going on, you better think again,” she said loudly and firmly, and shoved past him to walk into the room. This drew a round of delighted laughs from the team that continued until Coach Hall got them to settle down again. Shitty had winked at her as she’d passed him and that had been nice too.

 

* * *

 

Lardo had been a bit worried when she’d first met the team that they would mock her for studying art, but she’d found out that they all mostly seemed impressed by it. Ransom and Holster had frequently pestered her to show them her stuff, and she’d made the mistake of letting them know where the art studios on campus were. They don’t often show up to her dorm room uninvited (nobody but Shitty anyway) but they definitely track her down in the art building, which always ends up in some too-serious sculptor getting annoyed at the crowd of dudes in tanktops watching them work. Jack periodically gets asked if he wants to model for life drawing classes, but Jack is Lardo’s preferred painting company because he doesn’t talk and always gives her a hand in reaching the corners.

She’s getting some work done before she’s supposed to meet Bitty for coffee when Holster wanders in. She doesn’t really have time to be painting today, but she also doesn’t have time to squander studio space.

“Woah,” he says, because Lardo is up on a ladder holding a bucket of turquoise paint and a sponge. “Wicked cool, man.”

“Thanks,” Lardo backs down a couple of rungs so she can put the bucket down. “Still a work in progress but it’s not due til next week.”

“What does it mean?” Holster asks, and Lardo smiles.

“You tell me,” she says. “So what’s up? Or did you just come by for your daily dose of culture?”

“Maybe I did,” Holster says, but then he continues, “Uh, Rans says you know where my DVD of season 5 of 30 Rock is? It wandered off, like, a month ago and I’m dying.”

Lardo pauses at the bottom of the ladder and drops her sponge onto the cement floor. “Holster,” she says.

“What?” Holster asks.

Lardo says nothing, just glares at him.

“What?” Holster repeats, suddenly looking very alarmed.

“You didn’t read my email, did you,” Lardo says flatly.

“What em—I mean—uh—” Holster says.

“The email that I sent right after you guys got out of practice.”

“Uh.” He blinks. Lardo doesn’t.

“Which is the same time I send an email every Wednesday morning,” Lardo says.

“Um,” Holster says, and he takes a step back. “I’m gonna—I will go read that. Email. On it. Right away.” And he turns around and practically runs out of the studio. Lardo watches him go, and picks up her sponge again.

“You’ve gotta be a secret superhero,” Nick, into sculpting and set design and the keytar, sticks his head from behind his current project, “because from where I’m standing you just scared off a jock with the power of your eyebrows.”

Lardo gives him a look and then shrugs, a little sheepishly.

“Don’t pull the modesty card,” Nick says. “That’s a marketable skill and, frankly, it’s a little scary.”

“There’s a trick to it,” Lardo says. “All about the eye contact. Watch me put that on a resume. I’m a bromancer. I can summon and control male athletes.” She pauses, then starts laughing. She’ll have to tell that one to Sabine. 

The trick is to meet them on their level, to fake confidence so completely that you begin to believe it a little yourself, to not break eye contact. Lardo is feeling insecure about how this project is going to turn out, and has a pimple on her chin, and is annoyed nobody reads her emails, and simply doesn’t have enough time to do all the things she needs to get finished this week. But Holster doesn’t need to know that.

 

* * *

 

 

At the beginning of her second semester Lardo wound up helping Shitty and the other Haus inhabitants prepare for their welcome back party rather than just attending it. It was some kind of rite of passage, or something, and it mostly involved running to the Stop and Shop and listening to Shitty rant to Johnson about his inability to purchase a plastic bucket large enough to put all the punch he’s going to brew into. They’d walked to the Murder Stop and Shop despite its reputation, because the last time Lardo and Ransom had been in the other one they’d both been asked where they were from. “Boston” had not gone down well as an acceptable answer.

“I looked all over town,” he said. “I fuck you not. Nothing. No wading pools, no horse troughs. We used to use a big metal thing for it in high school, told our teachers it was someone’s laundry hamper.”

“Why don’t you just do it in the bathtub?” Lardo asked. Shitty had stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk so Lardo ran right into him. He then turned around very dramatically so Lardo ran into him again, this time into his front half instead of his back.

“Holy shit,” Shitty said slowly, and had solemnly put both his hands on Lardo’s shoulders.

“No? Too gross?” Lardo said, her stomach twisting up a little.

“You,” Shitty said, still in the same stately voice, “are a motherfucking bona fide genius, Larissa Duan. Holy hell. Oh my God.”

“Oh,” Lardo said. And then Shitty had hugged her, which had been nice.

“I’m never letting you go,” he said. “And you thought you’d be a bad team manager.”

“This isn’t really in my job description,” Lardo said, but she didn’t mind.

Later that night, Shitty had shoved his way through the crowd of people in the Haus to point at her across the pong table. She and Johnson were busy beating some lacrosse team opponents, but she paused to see what Shitty had to say.

“Lardo!” he’d bellowed.

“Huh?”

“Your honorary Samwell Men’s Hockey nickname, bro. What else?" 

“Lardo?” Lardo had said. She’d looked at the ping pong ball in her hand, then across the table, and then she’d taken her shot. The ball went right into the cup in the far corner, didn’t even touch the rim. “Guess it’s good luck,” Lardo said, and that had been that.

 

* * *

 

 

Lardo finishes up the corner of her canvas, washes up and goes to get coffee with Bitty. Her mom texts her as she’s walking across campus because she’s on her lunch break. She’s recently discovered emojis. Lardo promises to email her some pictures of the piece she’s working on and is, as always, caught somewhere between embarrassed and gratitude for her mother’s excitement.

Bitty isn’t alone, which really isn’t surprising these days. She spots Jack’s head over the crowd of people waiting in line for coffee first. Bitty is, predictably, a few steps in front of Jack, and they sit across from her at one of the tiny coffee tables so they’re practically shoulder to shoulder. Jack has the decency to look sheepishly in her direction when Bitty gets up to grab their coffees. Bitty fills them both in on his day, and doesn’t slow down until someone calls Lardo’s name and moves towards their table.

“Oh, Larissa, hey.” Kat is one of Lardo’s friends from this semester’s grueling digital design class, and she stops at their table, then frowns a little at Jack and Bitty, who do look a bit incongruous next to Kat’s sleek black skirt-and-scarf look and Lardo’s own black sweater and leggings. Art student outfits seem to exist on a spectrum, and Lardo is more on the minimal effort and no bra required end of things. Kat looks very glamorous all the time, like she’s hopped off the cover of an indie rock band album, and her hair is a different color almost every week. Today its very dark blue. Kat was someone Lardo had really wanted to sleep with when she’d first met her.

“Why weren’t you at the jam last night?” Kat asks, tapping her fingers on her disposable coffee cup. She has lots of rings on. “It was wicked!”

Bitty blinks at this. “Oh. Hockey stuff,” Lardo says. “Sorry I missed it. You all are doing it again next week, right?”

“Sure are,” Kat nods. “How on earth do you hang out with jocks anyway? I don’t know if I’ll ever understand it.”

“I’m multi-faceted,” Lardo says, because she’s been through this conversation many times before. Generally, people in her degree program stare at her when she tells them she’s the manager of the men’s hockey team. Her current favorite explanation is that it’s an elaborate performance art piece.

“Apparently,” Kat laughs. “You finish that assignment yet? It’s killing me. I never know what Jefferson’s gonna like in terms of composition, you know? He’s so erratic.”

“I have, like, an hour of work left on it,” Lardo says, which is a bit optimistic. “I’m gonna finish it in the morning. We’re having team dinner tonight.”

Kat shakes her head, dangly earrings swinging. “Sumita and I are gonna meet up and try to get it done. Come over if you want?”

Lardo thinks about it, because she and Sumita have emerged from that awkward we-dated-and-broke-up zone and she’s much better with digital art than Lardo is. But Lardo also knows she isn’t actually going to get anything done after dinner.

“Maybe I’ll catch you guys in the lab in the morning?” she says.

“Yeah, sounds good,” Kat says. “I’ll text you. See you!”

“Hockey stuff?” Bitty asks. “I’m pretty sure you and Nursey sat in the kitchen and talked about art until one in the morning last night.”

“Close enough,” Lardo says. “It’s easier than explaining what you all actually get up to. Oh, maybe Nursey will go to the jam with me next week, I’ll ask him.” Bitty picks up his phone as Lardo finishes her coffee, probably tweeting away.

“Who do you prefer?” he asks a second later.

“That’s unfair,” Lardo points out. “It is nice to hang out with other women, and with people who aren’t going to ask me what team Rothko plays for, no offense.”Jack opens his mouth and Lardo holds up a hand. “Google it, Zimmermann. Anyway, art students are way more pretentious when they drink. And in general, really. You, however, I would not replace with anyone from the art department.”

“I’m just trying to wrap my head around the fact that someone just willingly described me as a jock,” Bitty laughs. “That’s a first.”

“You’re a jock with class,” Lardo says.

Bitty looks pleased at this, and Jack looks down at his hands so Lardo raises her eyebrows at him. He frowns. She coughs. He rubs his finger on his clean-shaven upper lip and lets his eyebrows go up.

That’s a fair point, Lardo thinks.

“Y’all are so quiet, I don’t know how you stand it!” Bitty has finished tweeting and shakes his head. “I know I talk a lot, I don’t need to be reminded, but honestly.”

It’s all of them, really, Lardo thinks. Bitty is also a mishmash of interests and influences and they’re just facts about who he is. Jack is like that too, in his own way. Lardo likes all of them and she hopes they know she wouldn’t trade any of them in for anything else. Bitty stands up to throw out his coffee cup and gestures to Jack’s, and when Jack passes it over their fingers touch and they stare at each other a second too long.

They’re all a bit of a mess, bumping up into each other and skating around unspoken tenuous things, getting too close and backing away again. None of them fit neatly in boxes, and none of them are easily categorizable. That’s the nature of the human experience, Shitty would probably say. 

Lardo wants to paint it.

 

* * *

 

 

Lardo runs from coffee to the library, then from the library to Faber, then from Faber to her dorm. She mentally revises her to-do list as she walks, makes a note to meet Sumita and Kat tomorrow morning.

It had taken Lardo a few weeks to muster the courage to drag Sumita to a hockey kegster because the whole thing had come up out of the blue, and she hadn’t really expected anything to actually happen, and she wasn’t really looking forward to the chirps she’d inevitably get. The fact that she wasn’t straight had been one thing, a slow and tenuous discovery, but was a whole other one to see it realized in the form of a painter from Maryland with warm brown eyes and short curls. They sat next to each other in Lardo’s life drawing class, had bumped elbows when working because Lardo was left handed. Then she’d asked Lardo out, and Lardo had discovered firsthand that the roof deck of the Haus was the best place in the world to resolve a crisis.

It had been another matter entirely, however, to walk into a packed frat house with Kanye playing in the background and say, “Hey Holster, how’s it going, this is my girlfriend.” Her heart had been in her throat and Sumita’s fingers had been warm on the back of her arm.

“You guys are dating?” Ransom had shouted, barrelling into the conversation to drape an arm over Holster’s shoulders. “Dude, that is seriously way way—”

Lardo crossed her arms. She thought about smacking him, or raising her voice, or walking away, but held her ground.

“Uh,” Ransom blanched. “Really great. For you. You guys are cute together.”

“Money in the douchebag jar, bro,” Shitty said behind them.

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You were thinking it,” Lardo said. Ransom swore, but walked into the kitchen to shove five dollars into the jar.

“Thanks for coming,” Lardo said to Sumita few hours later, a few drinks and a few rounds of flip cup down. They’d been in the kitchen, Sumita leaning against the counter. “I know it’s pretty weird, but uh. Thanks."

“I had to see it to believe it,” Sumita said. “And I wouldn’t have missed watching you wipe the floor with those boys.” And she’d leaned forward to kiss her, got her lipstick on Lardo’s bottom lip. Lardo hadn’t wiped it off when they’d gone back into the living room.

 

* * *

 

Lardo’s freshman year she becomes the manager of a hockey team and dates a girl; her sophomore one she goes abroad and cuts off all her hair. Her junior year she falls for a jock. Life’s funny like that.

 

* * *

 

 

Sabine somehow succeeded in talking Lardo into taking a Monday-Wednesday afternoon comparative religions elective. Class is pretty slow today and the professor uploads her lecture slides so Lardo and Sabine sit towards the back out of her line of sight. They spend the two hours passing a piece of paper back and forth; Lardo starts by drawing something innocuous, like a spider, and then Sabine draws something that can effectively kill the spider, and so forth. By the end of class they’ve used up four pieces of paper and Lardo’s illustrated the apocalypse. Their professor reminds them all of the essay due in a week and a half and they file out, free for the day.

“You can come over for dinner if you want,” Lardo says as they step outside. Sabine laughs.

“No thank you,” she says, and they part ways. Lardo flips the collar up on her coat and walks towards the Haus.

“Oh Lardo, hi!” Chowder waves at her from the couch when she comes in the front door and she waves back. “Guess what!” Lardo cocks an eyebrow at him. “You know how I’ve been missing my Niemi jersey for weeks? I found it in the lost and found this afternoon! I don’t know why I didn’t look there in the first place, but then I read your email and I checked and there it was.”

“Oh my God you’re an angel,” Lardo says, and she goes to hug him. Chowder seems a little confused, but doesn’t resist. Sitting on the couch, their heads are level. “I think you’re the only person on this team who actually reads my emails,” Lardo clarifies.

“Oh,” Chowder says. “They’re from you, so they have to be important. People don’t?”

“The rest of you should all take notes,” Lardo says, giving Holster a dirty look, and gives Chowder another squeeze for good measure. A minute later, Bitty sticks his head around the door to the kitchen.

“Dinner is served,” he says, and starts herding people into the kitchen. He’s wearing a bowtie and an apron. Lardo has to admire his continued attempts to get the whole team to dress nicely for team dinner, even if it’s a bit of a lost cause. She lets go of Chowder and makes a beeline for the kitchen, because she’s learned by now that if she doesn’t get in line first there won’t be any food left, because the boys consistently underestimate her appetite. She grabs extra biscuits to take back to Sabine, because Bitty’s biscuits are beyond compare.

“Pants on during team dinner,” Bitty says sternly behind her, and Shitty swears. Lardo hears his two-at-a-time jumps up the stairs a second later.

“I am sure that Bits is team mom,” Ransom says into Lardo’s ear. “And I mean that completely and totally as the best compliment ever.” She whacks him in the abs, which hurts.

“You all up for all D-Men round of COD after this?” Holster says to Dex.

“Yeah, but Chowder has to cheer for me,” Dex says, and Nursey shakes his head. 

“Pre-drinks Chowder or post-drinks Chowder? Those are two different animals.”

“I’m not gonna cheer for any of you, so there. Also Farmer is coming over in a bit so you’re all on your own.” Holster whistles and claps Chowder on the back.

“Oh my god leave him alone,” Lardo says. “Bits and I both like Farmer. You can ignore the rest of them.” She looks over at Bitty for confirmation, but he’s messing with his iPod.

“Okay,” he says, and looks up at Jack, who is buttering a biscuit. “Who sings this one? You have three guesses.”

“Justin Bieber,” Jack says automatically, and everyone groans. Bitty rolls his eyes and Jack grins a little before pointing his butter knife in Shitty’s direction. “Shits, those are mine.”

Shitty has come back downstairs and is wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt with a bowtie printed on it. The sweatpants drag down over his feet.

“Gotta do laundry,” he shrugs. “These biscuits are out of this fucking world, Bits. If you want ‘em, Jacques, you can come get ‘em.” He winks in Jack’s direction, posing in the sweatpants.

“I meant real pants to dinner,” Bitty says, crossing his arms.

“Pants are an illusion,” Shitty says.

There’s something to this, and it’s hard for Lardo to explain. It’s harder to explain how she fits into it all. They’re all a bit mismatched though, Bitty and Ransom and Holster and Jack and the frogs and Shitty and everyone else, a funny collection of people with a billion conflicting interests and strange quirks and clashing accents. They shouldn’t all get along, but they do. They shouldn’t all be in one piece really but they are, a magical combination of Bitty’s warm and constant worry and Shitty’s sarcastic observation, Chowder’s enthusiasm, Jack’s sheer force of will. Lardo doesn’t know exactly when this weird group of dudes became her weird group of dudes, but it’s a done deal and not one she can back out of even if she wanted to.

Lardo is a lot of things to a lot of people, but they’re all just parts of a whole. There’s something to how the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her life slot together. Maybe the picture they form is a little abstract, not to everyone’s taste, but it’s one she’s worked on for a long time. It’s taken Lardo a long time to figure out where she fits. There were times when she felt she never would.

Lardo is always going to be a work in progress, but she doesn’t mind that. They all are.

She watches Holster break into song at the other end of the kitchen, which prompts Ransom to sock him in the stomach, which means Bitty has to shout about wrestling in his kitchen, which ends up in Jack smiling and raising his eyebrows and saying, “Your kitchen, Bittle?”

Haus dad, Lardo thinks. Whatever. There are worse things to be.

 

 

 

They’re all full to bursting and finishing off the cheap jug of wine Lardo had pilfered from the last art department mixer when Shitty elbows her in the stomach and mimes lighting a joint. Lardo shoots Sabine a text to let her know she won’t be home for a while before mentally giving up on any ideas of productivity and following Shitty upstairs. Sabine asks her what she’s up to.

 _smoking up w shits,_ Lardo responds. _u wanna join?_

 _nah got lab report to finish_ , Sabine’s texts reads. _by smoking up do u mean hooking up_

 _NO_ Lardo texts back right away. Then she pauses.

_there are way too many ppl in the haus rn i dont have a fucking death wish u know_

All she gets in response to that are a series of laughing cat face emojis, which she supposes she deserves. Shitty’s vanished, probably into his room, when Lardo was texting, so she slides the window in the hall open and scoots out onto the roof. The evening air is chilly and the street is starting to get dark, and Shitty isn’t out there like Lardo thought he would be. She sits down on one of the lawn chairs, metal armrests cold under her fingers, and texts him a series of question marks.

“To be honest I think you and Jack split fatherly responsibilities,” Shitty’s voice says, and Lardo nearly jumps out of her skin and off the roof. She manages to wrangle in her composure and turns to look at him. He’s sticking his head out of Jack’s bedroom window, and he pushes his duvet out first.

“Shut up,” Jack’s voice says from inside. “I am not your father. Get out of my room.”

Shitty grins and shimmies out of the window headfirst. In the five minutes since they came upstairs he divested himself of his clothes and is wearing plaid boxer briefs and a beanie and socks with penguins on them. He wiggles his butt, which is still inside the window, in Jack’s general direction. Jack kicks it, and Shitty cackles.

“If you’re going to stay up all night will you at least go downstairs so I don’t have to listen to your horrible laugh,” Jack says.

“Nope,” Shitty says. “I’m just gonna climb in with you.” Jack rolls his eyes and slams the window shut. “Case in point,” Shitty says, moving across the shingles to sit down next to Lardo, dropping the duvet over her knees and then arranging it over his. He leans against the wall of the house and puts one elbow on the arm of the lawnchair so they’re sharing armrest space. Lardo pretends to shove him off, but lets him return a second later to knock his elbow against hers. It’s probably too cold to be sitting outside, not really spring yet, but Lardo doesn’t mind. It’s an excuse to lean a little closer to him

“He’s the one yelling at everyone to get some sleep and eat their veggies,” Shitty continues, flicking his lighter.

“That is not in my job description,” Lardo says. This is more than a job. It was always more than a job.

“Oh,” Lardo says, remembering her conversation from this morning. “Wanna go to Rocky Horror with me and Sabine and a few other friends this weekend?”

“Can I wear a corset?” Shitty asks immediately.

“You’re not allowed to go if you don’t wear a corset,” Lardo says. “I’ll help you get it on.”

“Will you help me get it off later?” He looks over at her, smoke framing his face, his eyes bright in the light coming from the windows inside. Lardo can hear Bitty singing along to “No Scrubs” in his bedroom, and it cuts off suddenly, punctuated by Jack’s baritone. Bitty laughs a second later.

“Work, work, work,” she starts to say, and Shitty’s eyebrows go crazy. He makes a face that’s supposed to be lecherous so Lardo is obligated to lean over and cover his mouth with her hand before he can say anything out loud. He grins under her hand.

Lardo’s to-do list is a mile long, and she forgot to email her mother back, and she’s definitely going to have to drag her ass out of bed early to finish her assignment which means she’ll definitely need to reschedule her meeting with the coaches in the morning. She has no idea what she’s going to do for the junior art show or what she’s going to write down in her proposal for it that’s due next week, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to survive the rest of the semester’s workload and she really isn’t sure what’ll happen after Jack and Shitty graduate, or after she graduates, or any time after that. Thinking about that is terrifying, and it’s getting less and less easy to avoid.

She can feel Shitty’s smile under her fingers, and his mustache tickles.

“Here,” Shitty says under her hand. He pulls back a little to put the joint in his mouth, inhales, then leans forward. Lardo lets him lean over the armrest of the lawnchair and catch her face with his fingers until their chins touch, and exhale smoke into her mouth. It isn’t quite a kiss, but it feels like one. Shitty smells like weed and men’s scented soap, and Lardo presses into his bottom lip a little before pulling back so the smoke drifts up around her face.

The fact that they’re essentially kissing outside the hallway window should probably also be on her list of things to worry about. But it doesn’t get to her, not right now.

“You have a good day?” Shitty asks. He hasn’t moved his hand from her shoulder.

“Yeah,” Lardo says. She smiles. “I did.”

 


End file.
